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For most of the time, we all thought that Australia is going to be the new economic frontier. However, such is not so as the Australian economy is showing worrisome signs that it is going to face a tailspin which will put it in the direction of both a recession and an economic meltdown. The dependence on services and the removal of manufacturing, coupled with the massive outsourcing which the U.S.A once did in the mid 2000’s is now putting Australia in a precarious position, on which the Australians are in denial and are somewhat defiant that such is not so. Despite the fact that manufacturing has still maintained presence in New South Wales, The shutdowns of the Toyota, Ford and Holden automotive plants as well as Mitsubishi’s plant shutdown in 2008 has hurt the Australian economy far more than anyone can imagine. Also, relying on imports from Thailand, China, India, U.S.A and other nations is definitely going to strain Australia’s finances and also cause political instability in Australia.

The theories and concepts of business process outsourcing and engineering in the U.S.A have been quashed, with thanks to Donald Trump’s protectionist and nationalist policies that have not only rebounded and restored American manufacturing but have also taken suit in Europe as well as Africa and certain Asian nations. India is benefiting from a strong manufacturing base for both domestic and international consumption which has made its economic base stronger. Despite China having billions in its treasury, excessive mining has damaged its landscape and rivers, where carcinogenic metals have leaked into river waters thus producing polluted fish, sinkholes, cancers in villagers and cancers in agricultural produce. Moreover, with dozens of Chinese export goods like vegetables, meat, rice and other things banned and blacklisted by most O.E.C.D nations, China is officially in deep trouble.

When it comes to Thailand, they have benefited from a previously strong base and are benefiting from a rising auto industry that earns billions and even trillions! Mitsubishi, Ford and Toyota were given entries but on the basis of joint ventures, with shared research and development and controlled industrial expansion which will now give Thailand an even improved base for starting its own companies in automotive industry (Vehicles, Parts, Equipment) as well as shipbuilding and other manufacturing sectors, and that too with less pollution. Being environmentally and economically responsible, Thailand has invested in all sectors of the economy, from education and healthcare to tourism. With the Australian Dollar falling, its time for Australia to realize its mistake and fix its struggling economy.

The following graphs will help indicate Australia’s so called economic miracle and how it is tumbling down

Number of quarters the aforementioned economies endured without a recession since 1991

Australia’s commodity exports (Mineral and Fuel) as well as prices of Iron Ore and Coal per metric ton

The Australian Net Disposable Income has risen

So did the wage rates til some time but the hourly pay has fallen, and is further decreasing to concerning extent

Taking housing prices as a multiple of Annual Income, Australia has the most expensive housing market in the Anglosphere, the Southern Hemisphere and in the world as well as O.E.C.D nations

Whats even more concerning is that the Australian household debt levels are rising each passing day, and are not stopping! They are continuously rising which indicate Australia will default on its debt in the future

Australia is now relying on exporting services to save the balance of payments, which is certainly not possible. For that, Australia must restore manufacturing and export manufactured goods.

The problem lies in the policies of the Australian Government. The ambigious statuses of Rio Tinto mining corporation and BHP Billiton should raise alarms. They label themselves as multinationals, but with 2 headquarters (i.e. Melbourne and London for both) they both should be paying taxes in Australia and the United Kingdom but sadly, they just evaded Australian taxes whilst earning millions and billions off commodity exploration, mining, refining and export of minerals and even petroleum. Even if they are paying taxes in Australia, how come the British economy is ahead of the Australian economy? even after Brexit?

In 1991, Australia emerged from a recession, unemployment peaking at 11.1% and price of Iron Ore languishing at USD$15 per metric ton. John Howard, the leader of the consecutive party becomes Prime Minister in 1996 and decides to privatize state companies and reduce government spending resulting in strong export growth, stable Australian Dollar, good value of earnings coming from exports of both minerals and goods and manufacturing sector receiving good strength and investment. In the year 2001, Billiton plc of the United Kingdom agreed to merge with BHP of Australia, resulting in merger of two of the world’s largest iron ore producers. Two years later, China’s economy grows at an annual rate of 10 percent, giving a golden opportunity for BHP Billiton to earn billions from the export and sale of Iron Ore to China and Chinese businesses & Corporations, thereby making Australia a commodity strongman. 4 years later, in 2007, Kevin Rudd, a former Mandarin speaking diplomat who spent his formative years in poverty apologized to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders for the way they were treated and promised closer relations with People’s Republic of China, which then give Australian businesses and corporations, leverages for outsourcing business processes to China and other nations in Asia.

However, a year later, the Global Financial Crisis appears, risking thousands of jobs and businesses, sending commodity prices spiraling downwards and BHP Billiton deciding not to acquire Rio Tinto thus ending BHP Billiton’s 18 month pursuit. Commodity prices rebounded in the year 2009, with Chevron approving the USD$ 37 billion Gorgon offshore natural gas project resulting in the Australian Dollar achieving parity with the U.S Dollar. In 2011, Iron Ore was priced at USD$190 per metric ton, and mining workers earning more than AUD$ 175,000 annually just for digging, excavating, running drills and transporting the ore. Laid off workers from the manufacturing sector eventually found work as miners in Australia’s booming mining sector. The strong value of the Australian Dollar at that time did not place much emphasis on investing in manufacturing, rather mining giants were enjoying billion dollar earnings from export of Iron Ore, Gold and other commodities to China and other industrial powerhouses of that time. However, in 2012, this scene took an unprecedented U-Turn when Fortescue Metals Group announced cost cuts, lay offs, roll over of company funded barbecues as well as reduction in mining operations which spell the end of the mining boom and the start of the devaluation of the Australian Dollar.

2013 was a worrisome year as Holden’s parent company General Motors announced the ceasing of production in Australia within a few years. Conservative Politician Tony Abbott became Prime Minister while Governor of the Australian Central Bank Glenn Stevens warned against relying too much on mining again and called for restoring manufacturing, citing reasons such as an unprecedented massive economic downturn and default. in 2015, the price of Iron Ore fell down to USD$ 37 per metric ton, which then plummets salaries in mining, leading to Liberal politician Malcolm Turnbull ousting Tony Abbott, with Turnbull promising to diversify the Australian economy. in 2016, economic indicators show Australia entering deflation and Malcolm Turnbull surviving the 2016 elections by a narrow margin, leaving his Government in a fragile position.

Apart from that, with Uber threatening to take over the Australian taxi sector, various municipalities planned on giving AUD$ 125,000 per taxi driver as golden handshake term deposits but that was overturned with massive protests from municipal taxi drivers and economists as well as the general public alike, who argued that not only will this further raise debt levels but also leave thousands unemployed. Furthermore, Uber’s cost mechanisms were revealed to be shady and Uber has been banned in many countries across the globe.

Australia is now earning from Higher education, seeing an influx of many foreign students, Tourism; generating millions from Chinese and other western tourists as well as high end defense and biotech manufacturing; which is facing challenges from high wages and low competitiveness. Furthermore, with the Chinese economy falling into recession, Australia looks more likely to fall into recession, political instability becoming visible and the housing bubble is also more likely to blow, sending housing prices even lower than that of the U.S.A, Canada and Hong Kong.

With Holden now taken over by PSA of France and more likely to be produced outside of Australia, coupled with the shutdown of Ford Australia’s and Toyota’s manufacturing plants in the state of Victoria, the Australian is officially in trouble. Though Aircraft parts are being manufactured in South Australia, the Australian economy is in trouble and now it needs to reorganize itself and bring manufacturing back or else, it will go down as among the worst affected economies ever.

In the early hours of Sunday, July 30, 1916, an explosion, with the force of a 5.5 magnitude earthquake that could reportedly be felt as far away as Maryland, rocked Jersey City, New Jersey. Plate glass windows in buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn were blown out, the Brooklyn Bridge shook and the nearby Statue of Liberty was pummeled with shrapnel. At first, investigators believed the catastrophe was an accident, but later investigations would show the disaster an act of sabotage by the Germans, who wanted to stop deliveries of ammunition to Allied forces in World War I.

Two years after the start of World War I, the greater New York region was a major hub of the American munitions industry, with “75 percent of all ammunition and armaments shipped from the United States to Europe went out within a radius of five miles of City Hall in Lower Manhattan,” according to “Sabotage at Black Tom” by Jules Witcover. It was Black Tom, once a small island, that was “the single most important assembly and shipping center in America for munitions and gunpowder being sent to the Allies,” Witcover notes, and “probably housed the most extensive arsenal anywhere outside the war zone itself.”

While the United States had not yet entered World War I and was officially neutral, American munitions dealers could legally sell to any of the warring nations. Most of the arms, however, were going to the Allies—Britain, France and Russia—because the British navy had blockaded Germany.

The first of the Black Tom explosions was felt at 2:08 a.m. followed half an hour later by a second blast. At least five people were killed, including a baby in Jersey City who was thrown from his crib, and there was an estimated $20 million—the equivalent of some $500 million today—in property damage.

Wrecked warehouses and scattered debris attest to power of an explosion. (Credit: US Army Signal Corps / Getty Images)

The blasts also wreaked havoc at the site. As described by Witcover: “The Black Tom promontory was a charred ruin; 13 huge warehouses were leveled and six piers destroyed, and fires continued to eat their way through the remains and consume hundreds of railroads cars and barges tied to the docks. At one point, a huge cavern was hewed out of the earth by the explosions of some 87 dynamite-laden railroad cars. The blast excavated a hole so deep that it extended below sea level; water seeped in until a vast pond was created, strewn with the wreckage.”

In the aftermath of the explosions, law-enforcement agents quickly arrested officials from the railroad, storage company and barge business who operated from the Black Tom site. However, investigators were unable to determine whether the disaster was the result of safety violations by any of these officials. One thing the authorities initially seemed to agree on was that the explosions weren’t the work of foreign saboteurs. It would take years for a persistent team of American lawyers to find sufficient evidence that showed that in fact the disaster had been plotted by the Germans. The lawyers sued Germany in the Mixed Claims Commission at The Hague, and in 1939 won the case. Germany, under the rule of Hitler, failed to pay up and the settlement was renegotiated in the early 1950s. The last payment was made to Black Tom claimants in 1979.

Fire raging at National Storage House, one of plants blown up by the explosion and spreading of fire. (Credit: Bettmann /Getty Images)

Today, the Black Tom site is part of New Jersey’s Liberty State Park. Nearby at the Statue of Liberty, a legacy of the disaster remains: Due to the damage the statue sustained on July 30, 1916, its torch has been closed to the public for the last century. Many have hopelessly and falsely associated this blast with conspiracy theories of the new world order but the fact of the matter is that this was a deliberate act of sabotage by the German empire eventually turning into Germany’s loss in the First World War.

Iceland, is actually an island but it isn’t full of ice. it has some pastures, a lot of volcanoes and yes, it is in the northern latitudes of the northern hemisphere. A large part of its electricity comes from geothermal sources such as hot water springs. and yes, they are a tourist attraction.

Apart from them, you’ll have more than just 10 reasons to fall in love with Iceland :).

Ion luxury adventure hotel 🙂

The hotel’s bedrooms

The main hall

Ion luxury adventure hotel, sitting between lush forests and volcanoes, you can trek outside into the Icelandic Terrain and even see the Northern lights

Landmannalaugar Mountains

Kinda resembles game of thrones, right?

The Golden Circle

The Golden Circle

Silfra Diving

Silfra Diving

The Blue Lagoon

The geothermal pool I was talking about. That’s right, the hot water spring that is one of Iceland’s greatest tourist attractions

Well, you’re seeing attractions. there’s plenty more to why we should love Iceland

Volcanoes: Pretty important to Iceland’s existence.

Iceland’s situated where two tectonic plates meet in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The nation has a whopping 30 active volcanic systems, making it a haven for scientists and tourists alike who can’t get enough of one of nature’s most chaotic yet paradoxically creative geological feature.

Jon Snow of the Game of Thrones. I’m sorry, I haven’t seen a single episode of this show, yet I’m following some of its facebook posts :D.

Whoever watches the biggest TV series on the planet will have seen the gorgeous vistas that cover Iceland. The show’s an American production and is filming in various location across the globe, but many of its most iconic backdrops were shot in Iceland.

Oh Bjork, we all love you to bits and pieces.

She, is the most famous music artist ever to have emerged from Iceland. Bjork’s style is impossible to pigeonhole and always experimental. Her most famous song is probably ’90s hit ‘Oh So Quiet’, though she’s got a lengthy discography having had a career spanning 30 years. and that’s why we love her :D.

The Northern Lights. and as Kid Rock once said “The Northern Lights and the Southern Comforts, Best gift Man can ever have.”

Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights are considered a holy grail for many people’s bucket lists, and Iceland has become a European tourist haven for hunting down the beautiful geomagnetic phenomenon.

Holy Shit! Hafthor Júlíus Björnsson aka The Mountain from Game of Thrones. A winner of the World’s Strongest Man, forget the biceps he’s a man mountain and a real life Thor!

Icelandic men dominated the ‘strongman’ competition in the ’80s and ’90s, winning eight titles over a 12-year period. Their most recent export with bulging biceps is Hafthór Júlíus Björnsson, better known as The Mountain in Game of Thrones – who has finished in the top three of the World’s Strongest Man competition for four years in a row.

Still, Cristiano Ronaldo should watch out for him!

SIGUR RÓS

The post-rock band, named after the frontman’s sister, make ridiculously beautiful music and have been around for 22 years. If you haven’t heard of Sigur Rós before now, type euphoric single ‘Hoppipolla’ into your search engine of choice and get wowed big time!

Renewable Energy, in the form of Hotsprings.

While the world struggles to curb fossil fuel usage (efforts are shameful to say the least), Iceland leads the way by powering itself completely on renewable energy. Geothermal power and hydroelectric harnessing of running water make for inexpensive water, gas and electric bills!

Wow! no wonder they have clean fresh air and water. I think I should move to Iceland.

Unnur Birna Vilhjálmsdóttir, Miss Iceland and Miss World 2005.

India and the United Kingdom with 5 & Venezuela with 6 have won more Miss World titles than the tiny nation of Iceland, who has won 3. Unnur Birna Vilhjálmsdóttir, pictured, was the most recent winner in 2005 and beauty pageantry is clearly a family business – her mother Linda was crowned Miss World 22 years earlier.

Protest in Reykjavik, 2010. when the Icelandic economy fell into recession, the nation took to the streets to ensure safety of its economy.

Best way to deal with rotten bankers, jail em’ and use their assets to finance deficits instead of folding.

When Iceland’s economy collapsed in 2008, it didn’t shrivel up and fold, despite facing financial ruin. Instead it jailed the bankers, focused its efforts on tourism to bring the economy back from the brink and now it’s one of the best places to live in the world.

Handball is Iceland’s national sport. Pictured here is the team that won Gold at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China.

Prior to their run to the Euro 2016 quarter-finals, the only team sport that Iceland have been considered heavyweights is handball, the nation’s national sport. The men’s handball team won a silver medal at the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, which was only Iceland’s fourth ever medal in the multi-sports competition.

Wow, look at that. That proves Iceland is the world’s best nation to live in. and yes, I have to learn the Icelandic language. The women are pretty, the men are handsome, the nation is beautiful, the hot springs are cool and there is much more. Hey, I wish I could be a part of Iceland’s national team, it surely rocks!

Now tell me, which one of you knows Perth & Western Australia ? Yes, Perth & Western Australia ! I believe everyone knows them both 🙂
The Western Australia Cricket Association (WACA) Ground, Domain Stadium (Subiaco Oval) & nib stadium are among the city’s largest outdoor sporting facilities 🙂

But more than that, Perth has a lot more than just nightlife and sports. Allow me to show you the beautiful face of Perth 🙂

Perth is the capital of the province of Western Australia and is a gem of a metropolis in the middle of the desert. Once deemed as land unsuitable for farming and unable to become a settlement, it was founded on June 4th, 1829 and the first Monday of each June every year is a public holiday in all of Australia as it marks the Western Australia day. Though it is small in size and in terms of population as well as compared to other global cities but it nonetheless is the largest city & capital of Western Australia & is home to the band ‘Empire of the Sun’.

Perth is not just any city, this is city makes you feel much worthy about yourself. it’s pristine beaches, year round warm climate, lively night culture, vibrant economy, loads of green spaces, ethnically & religiously diverse population combined with a unique mix of old & new architecture. Perth’s beaches are truly divine, (being the only metropolis in Western Australia) draws more than a million tourists each year and nowadays is drawing immigrants from around the world. Perth’s beaches are among the best in Australia and are the best beaches of Western Australia following the beaches of Wollongong, Gold Coast, Brisbane & Sydney.

Bibra lake is the name of both a lake and a suburb in Perth itself. the Bibra lake suburb is name. Benedict von Bibra, a businessman bought the land which is now the Bibra lake suburb & assessed from the nearby stringy back trees that the reservoir would become a lake.

The majority of the suburb, which is not part of the Beeliar Regional Park contains a major light industrial area, with businesses such as Amcor.Bibra Lake is the location for several major private recreation facilities, which include Adventure World theme park, a bungee jumping tower, Cockburn Ice Arena, paint ball and laser tag operations. Bibra Lake also has a Waldorf primary school and a Montessori primary school. it also has the manufacturing facilities and headquarters for OKA Australia.

Eagle bay is a beach in South west of Perth. Unique combination of clear sands, clear blue seas and rocks by the shore, this beach is a ‘Masterpiece’ tourist attraction. I wish I had my home near this beach :).

Kings Park is located in Perth, east of its central business district and is 4.06 square kilometers in size (larger than New York’s central park). During September of each year Kings Park hosts Australia’s largest wildflower show and exhibition – the Kings Park Festival and besides tourist facilities, Kings Park contains the State War Memorial, the Royal Kings Park Tennis club and a reservoir. The streets are tree lined with individual plaques dedicated by family members to Western Australian service men and women who died in both World Wars I & II.

Synergy Parkland (a feature of the park) is one of two children’s playgrounds in Kings Park, the other being the Ivey Watson Playground. It includes a lake and island, play and climbing equipment for children, and life-sized model dinosaurs. Energy themes, Vietnam war memorial & Zamia cafe are located in the Synergy Parkland (Sponsored by Energy firm Synergy).

18 Kilometers off the coast of Fremantle, Western Australia lies Rottnest Island. It is governed by the Rottnest Island authority under a special parliamentary act, Rottnest is a popular holiday destination, and there are daily ferry services to Perth. It has a permanent population of around 100 people, with around 500,000 annual visitors (and up to 15,000 visitors during peak periods). A sandy, low-lying island formed on a base of limestone, Rottnest is an A-class reserve, the highest level of protection afforded to public land. A number of native and introduced bird species nest near the shallow salt lakes in the island’s interior, and Rottnest has consequently been designated an important bird reserve. The island also includes three endemic tree species, notably the Rottnest Island pine and was heavily forested before settlement. Rottnest is perhaps best known for its population of quokkas , a small native marsupial. The island also includes colonies of Australian sea lions & southern fur seals.

Another beautiful area of Perth is Sorrento, a northern suburb. it was assumed that it’s name was taken from the Italian town of Sorrento when a land survery was being conducted for this city way back in 1929.P rior to white settlement, the Whadjuk Aboriginal people, who called the area Mooro, gathered abalone and other shellfish in large numbers off the nearby reefs.

Sorrento is a residential suburb, relying on the Seacrest Village shopping centre for basic commercial services, and Whitford City and Centro Warwick for other services. Several parks of various sizes are situated in the suburb.The Sorrento Quay retail development within the Hillarys Boat Harbour sits on the northwestern boundary of the suburb. Off the coast is the Marmion Marine Park, which provides a home for many species of marine animals.

Australia is no doubt beautiful & unique. Despite being in the midst of desert landscape of the Australian West, Perth has it’s own unique greenery and has truly stood out to be a gem in Australia’s crown. It is relatively affluent, has lots of hi-rises, beautiful parks and ever present greenery despite the reduce in rainfall. Til this day, Perth continues to be as beautiful as ever and is further contributing to Western Australia & Australia as a whole. For those who want to Australia but a city other than Sydney, Gold Coast & Melbourne, Perth is the city that’ll promise you a lot both Western Australia and Perth have to offer 🙂

Via Helen Bloomer on Facebook.
(Note: Government of South Africa has not been providing any vital statistics for the past 8 years, Information collected is provided by my personal contacts who are living in South Africa)

Paying homage to the slain White South African farmers on Human Rights day in Ysterberg at the WITKRUISMONUMENT….here are 4000 reasons in alphabetical order and the list is far from finished.

God save the white people of South Africa. Read the names of the murdered, From 128000 commercial farmers 30 years ago to just 40000 today.

What a misconception the white tribes have that they are safe. Here are thee Italians, English, Portuguese, Afrikaners, Dutch, German and others. Whites must unite as this is not a Boer holocaust alone.. it is white Genocide. The South African Police Service (S.A.P.S) do not give us statistics so the public of South Africa endeavors to maintain it’s own records.

According to various sources, almost 80,000 White People have been murdered by certain members of black tribes in South Africa since 1994!
These people were shot, bludgeoned, hacked, tortured, burnt, raped, disemboweled, stabbed, had sulfuric acid poured down their throats, burnt with boiling water, their flesh burnt to the bone with clothing iron’s, drowned in boiling water, gutted or impaled.

There is no official list available with the names of all these victims and since 2007 it has become very difficult to keep any kind of record as police no longer mention the race of the victim nor the perpetrator on the official reports.

This list alone contains over 4,000 names of victims of farm attacks and is still incomplete as we are looking at the region of more like 6,000 realistically. It took a lot of time to compile this list, so please kindly bare with the author.

Images are graphic but true. These gruesome murders are the evil brainchild of Nelson Mandela and the communist African National Congress (A.N.C). All of this has been legalized by Jacob Zuma and all of this has been happening since 1994. Nelson Mandela is a criminal, not a saint!!!!!!

The whites of South Africa are innocent people and they need your help!!!!!!!!

African National Congress (A.N.C), the criminals responsible for the murders of innocent whites in South Africa. They are the perpetrators of White Genocide in South Africa

We need to overthrow Jacob Zuma, else South Africa will die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Else, it will be legal to say Kill the F**king nigger, Kill the F**king Blacks!!!!!!!!!!

Flag of the Republic of South Africa.Something tells me this flag is gonna be replaced by the old one, case similar to Libya

What comes in your mind when you hear the name “South Africa”? what comes? Most will say Nelson Mandela, a freedom fighter. but is that all? Try again, what more? Crime? Corruption? Greed? Apartheid? all the negative stuff. Doesn’t anyone remember what is was? does anyone remember the glory days of the good old nation of South Africa? Forget Hendrik Verwoerd, Forget Mandela, Forget Frederik Wilhelm DeKlerk (responsible for selling the country to Black communists in 1994). South Africa was Africa’s mighty steed, a stud, a diamond in the rough. despite international sanctions, it proved itself to be a power. Now, its dying 😦 and despite the introduction of the black economic empowerment (B.E.E) by the ruling African National Congress (Communist sons of bitches involved in killing South Africa), mroe and more blacks are dying of pvoerty and hunger, Whites are being killed like flies and so are coloreds (Mixed race ancestry) and Indians.

The original flag of South Africa, highlighting the Dutch heritage brought Jan van Riebeeck

A few images of a few cities of South Africa will shock you. you will ask yourself, are these American cities? breath taking skylines, where are they? the moment you learn that they are in battered and torn apart South Africa, you will be turned off sadly. You cannot imagine how great the cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town were. Only Cape Town survives today, the rest are dying a slow and painful death 😦

Johannesburg

Skyline of the Great City of Johannesburg, Africa’s largest city and world’s most dangerous as well

Johannesburg is both South Africa’s and Africa’s largest city with a population of 4,434,827 people & isthe world’s largest city not situated on a river, lake, or coastline. Blacks account for 73% of the population, followed by whites at 16%, coloreds at 6% and Asians at 4%. 42% of the population is under the age of 24, while 6% of the population is over 60 years of age. 37% of city residents are unemployed. 91% of the unemployed are African. Women comprise 43% of the working population. 19% of economically active adults work in wholesale and retail sectors, 18% in financial, real estate and business services, 17% in community, social and personal services and 12% are in manufacturing. Only 0.7% work in mining. English despite being the most commonly understood language South African at one time is now the fourth most spoken, a drop in ranking because most of Johannesburg’s black population is not only unemployed and illiterate but also speak traditional African languages (only 18% of Johannesburg’s population speaks English). apart from this, Johannesburg has the world’s largest dry post, trucking and transporting being a large industry. Immediately after the fall of apartheid, blacks from surrounding townships flooded the city center. though Sandton (a new business district) was developed in the north east of Johannesburg central and a lot of businesses were revived, it took a turn for the worse at the onset of 2005, when Jacob Zuma was elected president. The black economic empowerment (B.E.E) is an affirmative action policy only supporting blacks connected to the African national congress (A.N.C) and ruling elite. it left whites unemployed, destitute with many white women turning to prostitution for survival. Indians were also badly marginalized, many leaving the country for America, England, Australia and even neighboring African countries of Mozambique and Namibia as well as the Middle east. Thousands of high end jobs went to uneducated black goons who helped tear down key South African companies and turn them into machines of loss. South Africa post office, Eskom and South African airways are the three key important firms that are dying. Management consists of political cronies, convicted criminals with records so horrible no sensible can believe how they made it there. Millions of Rands gone in months, disappeared, financial statements manipulated and the B.E.E not letting whites and coloreds in these firms. a sad state indeed, is this what Mandela wanted?

Eskom. South Africa’s main power company badly abused and battered, left for dead.

Loadshedding (power outages) have exceeded a daily average of 11 hours, bad enough to plunge the country back into the stone age. a shortage of around 28000 Megawatts is unable to be fulfilled and previous promises and plans of more power plants have gone up in flames and fumes. Tshediso John Matona, the incumbent CEO was convicted and accused of 11 cases of fraud and corruption in the past 7 years & many question how he is till the CEO of Eskom. Privatization strategies are failing and the company is currently on a hospital bed.

Post Office South Africa.Africa’s DHL now Delay mail

Formerly the DHL of Africa, South Africa’s pride. with labor unionized by the black economic empowerment, delays in delivery of mail now exceed months. in fact a lot of mail has not even been delivered in two years, Rates are usually exorbitant and the service quality is very very poor. B.E.E is the guilty part for destroying this once robust bear.

International Post office, South Africa post.Undelivered mail could be possibly stolen as well.

Inflated certainty that mails and parcels are not just undelivered but stolen as well.

South African Airways.World’s former greatest now the worst.

Africa’s best airline for 10 years til 2006 took a deep plunge after that year. Labor unionized, whites kicked out, delays in flights and drop in service quality is just the beginning. Profits became losses and board of directors are convicted for corruption, embezzlement and fraud. the airline is dying, all the 747’s were forcibly phased out to be sold, only for a whistle blowers report to delay the sale and heckle the directors. South African Airways is worse, dying and rotting badly. with the Black economic empowerment in place, lack of trained blacks is hurting the airline and since it is state owned, Whites are hardly able to join it.

Destinations such Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, New York, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Tokyo, Bangkok are no longer served by South African airways. all are now served by Emirates. Mismanagement by goons has taken a huge toll on the airline, which reported a loss of 455 million rand in fourth quarter of 2014.

Mob violence in Johannesburg dated: March 15th, 2014.

The B.E.E is also hurting blacks: most are unemployed, denied access to education and victims of daily crime activities. South Africa is a hell hole these days and its taking a turn for the worse each passing day. Mob violence has risen, buses torched, buildings ransacked, shops and stalls robbed, people injured,cars jacked and damaged. Crime is rising day after day, the police is not only ill equipped but also full of convicted criminals who are involved in crimes. Security and law enforcement is now upto private security companies who often have to brave explicit conditions to arrest criminals.

Skyline of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Indeed, a great city it once was. it is now dying. a site of one of Africa’s best buildings, they are all decaying. with the educated people gone, innocents dying, inflation sky high, no security, this once great city is now in tatters. Daily upto 80 people are murdered (only half are reported), the city’s rape capital of the world (100 rapes/week as females have more chances of being raped instead of being educated), carjackings are a norm, police unable to do much as criminals are cronies of the ruling ANC government.

An abandoned upscale apartment complex in Hillbrow, South Africa

Hillbrow was an upscale district, inhabited by all races but were literate enough. propaganda of Apartheid almost ruined Hillbrow and bombings by the ANC in 1983 killed 85 people in a month (May 1983) but the place was fortunate enough to survive and it thrived, only for Mandela’s release to screw everything. Come 1994, Hillbrow was devoid of literate residents and occupied by illiterate blacks who in fact were illegal migrants from other parts of Africa. Today, gunshots, screams are the only heard in Hillbrow. Crime and violence are so rampant that its hard for an innocent person to even set foot in Hillbrow

Former building of the Johannesburg stock exchange, now in ruins.

Urban blight has hit Johannesburg hard and still continues to do so. the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is now in the upscale district of Sandton, Africa’s most expensive square mile and a very expensive district. However, policing is done by private security firms as the South African Police Service (S.A.P.S) is relatively ineffective and is causing trouble for every innocent South African. IBM, Apple, Lowe advertising, Leo Burnett, JWT, Samsung, Barclays, ABSA (Amalgamated Banks of South Africa), Toshiba, HP & Coca Cola are all headquartered here as the central business district all went up in flames.

Sandton, Johannesburg’s newest central business district.

Sandton was formed in 1969 after the merger of two suburbs, Sandown and Bryanston. after the reorganization of the South African government in 1994, Sandton lost its status as an independent city and became a part of Johannesburg. Beneficiaries of the Black economic empowerment hang out in Sandton and Sandton’s immunity from the effects of the African National Congress is at stake. Black residents residing here are linked to the ANC and hence are linked to crime. Flagship station of the GauTrain, a bullet rain service for the province of Gauteng in South Africa (where Johannesburg is situated).

Urban blight has fueled the crime in Johannesburg, and from 2004 til now 160,000 people have died as a result of crime. Many lives been dehumanized and shattered. More than half of the perpetrators are poverty stricken, a complicated entitlement complex stuck in their minds and this complex is the reason why they commit crimes. Nothing has been done by the ruling African national congress, and the situation gets worse day after day.

A few pictures and infographics about crime in Johannesburg and South Africa.

Know the burglar.Despite these programs, Crime is still at a high. Govt of South Africa is the main sponsor of crime

Inforgraphic on crime in South Africa

Scene of carjacking in Johannesburg.Dated: 19th June, 2008.

An abandoned office building in Johannesburg central business district.

Parkview Apartments, Hillbrow.Now a shadow of its former self

A Hillbrow hostel

A poverty stricken black resident of Johannesburg, hurt by B.E.E

International post office, South Africa ransacked by goons in Johannesburg last year.

Mob violenceDated: 19th may 2014

Abandoned Hillbrow apartments

Mob violence, Xenophobia, crimes, murders, fraud are now Johannesburg’s friends :(. a once vibrant city full of trade, now is a hub for gang violence and the city’s municipal government is in tatters, shattered by corruption of the African National Congress (ANC) who have not only robbed the valuable rands payed in taxes by all hard working South Africans but have also destroyed this great city and is turning it into a wasteland of a city. A.N.C consists mostly of communist crooks who have done nothing for South Africa and are continuously destroying the country.

African National Congress (A.N.C), the criminals inc.

Democratic Alliance: South Africa’s only hope

Democratic Alliance is a new party, formed by former journalist and minister Helen Zille. not only has her party transformed Cape Town into a diamond but also plans to do the same for Johannesburg and Durban. My Prayers for Johannesburg and its citizens. May this city Rise again from the ashes.

It is true that the Irish people have gone through Hell, they have been dehumanized and the reason of their hatred for the English is legitimate.

Coat of Arms of the Republic of Ireland

The saddest part is that they have been enslaved but none of these facts ever made it to mainstream media and did not even make it to books :(. British author Oliver Cromwell explained this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor in clear words.

Irish Child Slaves

The Irish came as slaves: human cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

Irish slave being flogged in the open by its English owner

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But are we talking about African slavery? King James VI and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish.

Slave Auction at a marketplace in Colonial Virginia. Stories of Irish enslaved by the British never made it to mainstream media sadly.

The Irish slave trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.
By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

Irish slaves being auctioned

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

A female Irish woman with her kids in abandoned state. Most were forced into slavery & even left for dead when given freedom

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

Irish Slave laborers group photograph.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (£50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than £5 Sterling). If a planter whipped, branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce.
Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls (many as young as 12) with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

Irish slaves tending to English landlords in Jamaica

There is little question the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more, in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.
In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded this chapter of Irish misery.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be the one that their English masters intended: To completely disappear as if it never happened.

Irish children working on an American plantation

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

British Settlers in Algoa Bay, South Africa in 1820. they started arriving in South Africa
at the onset of the 18th century Franco-British War

The start of the conflict between Britain and France at the end of the 18th Century saw Britain make a tactical move for military occupation of territories controlled by its rivals mainly the Dutch, French and the Germans. It began doing so by taking the strategically important step of militarily occupying the Cape, for fear that the Dutch would turn it over to the French and thereby cut the British sea route to the East. The British had occupied the Cape twice: once in 1795 (they withdrew a short while after) and the second time in 1806 (they stayed on that time).

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Britain formally purchased the Cape from the Dutch for six million pounds and another colony was added to the growing British Empire. The white population of the Cape Colony in 1806 was of some 26,000 – and a slave population of some 30,000, with an estimated Cape Colored population of 20,000.

The British takeover of the Cape Colony brought in several changes of which the most important was the arrival in of over 3,000 British settlers in the Eastern Cape in 1820 and they were recruited with special financial aid of the British Government to bolster the White population on the eastern border with the Xhosa, where the intermittent race wars were continually threatening to overwhelm the isolated White towns. However, this was not just to increase white population in general but of the white English population as The British were smarter than their rivals when it came to hostile takeovers but nevertheless proved better than the others in other parts of the world except South Africa.

Within a matter of weeks, the influx of a large number of English speaking whites spiked the white population by 12 percent and caused a general Anglicization in the Cape area which affected the Dutch speaking Trek Boers. Although, many of those who had stayed close to Cape Town did not vocally object as compared to the Boers present on the frontiers of modern day South Africa the Anglicization process led to the introduction of English laws: in 1822, English became the sole official language; in the same year, the Cape Coloured population were included in the first labour laws and finally slavery itself was abolished in 1833. Furthermore, the British government offered compensation for the 35,000 slaves in the Cape Colony, to the Trek Boers – but this was only paid out in London, Hence making it practically impossible for most of the slave owners to collect their compensation. This was a major tactic to baffle the Boer people in South Africa.

A combination of factors: the Anglicization policy, the introduction of English law and the then seemingly unending wars with the Xhosas created the Great Trek (participants becoming known as Boer Trekkers, Trek Boer(s) or Voortrekker). From 1836 , around some 15,000 Trek Boer families packed up their goods into canvass covered wagons and set off for the interior, away from British rule. This Great Trek was the final catalyst for the formation of the people who became known as the Boers (the word Afrikaners was only developed late in the 19th century once the language spoken by the White non-English speakers had crystallized). By the time the Great Trek was over, the Boers had been formed into a distinct national identity of their own, fiercely independent and strongly Calvinistic in religion.

The dangers and epic of the great Trek alone have filled many a book: the effort of having to cross the highest mountain range in Southern Africa, called the Drakensberg (the Dragon Mountains – a deserved name) in ox wagons; the necessity of having to create much of their raw material and many supplies along the way; and the trials and tribulations of doing all of this with entire families in tow, was a truly remarkable achievement, and the trek itself came to assume almost superhuman status and symbolism in the White Boer psyche. A small group of Trekkers (pioneers) moved into the interior, into what became the Orange Free State and Transvaal, while a larger group crossed the Drakensberg mountains and decided to settle in what was to become Natal (known today as Kwa-Zulu Natal where Pietermaritzburg, Nkandla and Durban are present).

Drakensburg Mountains

Leaving their jumping off points in the central and eastern Cape, small groups of Whites set off for the interior, with only covered wagons, horses and their ingenuity to guide them as they trekked into the wild, untamed, unknown and dangerous interior. The first small expedition, which started in 1835 ended in complete failure. Jan van Rensburg’s small party was ambushed and exterminated by violent Zulu Blacks on the Highveld field. Yet another party, led by Louis Trichardt, barely survived attacks by Blacks and was then decimated by malaria, with a few desperately ill survivors finally struggling through to the Portuguese base at Lourenco Marques (today Maputo, Mozambique) in Portuguese East Africa. The first two expeditions were therefore disastrous, producing a fatality rate of well over 80 per cent. Nonetheless, the issues forcing the Boers on did not diminish, and slowly over the next two years support for a new migration grew.

Port Elizabeth based Boer Piet Retief, in 1837 organized an expedition from Grahamstown, after issuing a manifesto outlining his reasons for undertaking the Trek into the interior. After joining with an expedition led by Andries Potgieter for the initial trek north, Retief and his party turned eastwards over the Drakensberg mountains (the Dragon Mountains) in a virtually superhuman effort of unparalleled endeavour and hardship. Little wonder then, that when they reached the apex of the Drakensberg, and the green lands of Natal stretched out before their eyes, they called the land Blydevooruitzicht, or Happy Prospects.

There was however one serious issue: the fierce and warlike Zulu tribe under the leadership of their ferocious chief, Dingaan already occupied the new land. While the bulk of Retief’s party – which consisted mainly of women, children and aged men – encamped along the Blaukraans River, Retief led a party of 70 men and teenage boys on a peace mission to Dingaan at the latter’s chief settlement, or kraal, called Umgungundlovu.

The purpose of the mission was to try and peacefully negotiate land for the Trek party from the Zulus. Dingaan however accused the Trekkers of stealing cattle from him; only after several weeks searching did Retief’s party manage to locate the missing cattle (they had been stolen by a local chief called Siyonkella).

On 2 February 1837, the Boers returned to Umgungundlovu with the missing cattle: on 5 February, Dingaan and Retief signed a treaty (Dingaan signed it with a “X”, as he was illiterate) giving the Boers land in Natal. After the signing of the agreement, the Zulus put on a dancing show and celebration. In turn the White Boers gave a shooting and horse riding demonstration to the Blacks: confirming the reports Dingaan had already received about these White men who had sticks which could kill at a distance and who had magic beasts which could carry a rider at great speed.

However on the following day (6th February 1837), the 70 White men were up before daybreak. As they prepared to leave to return to their camp where their women and children were waiting, a Zulu messenger arrived. He carried with him a message from Dingaan asking that Retief and his men meet one more time inside the Zulu king’s enclosure where the two parties would toast their successful negotiations and future friendship.

The Whites agreed. Retief and his men made their way to the Zulu king’s inner enclosure. Before they entered the final ring of mud huts and reed walls, they were asked to leave their firearms stacked in a pile outside as a mark of respect to the king: foolishly they agreed, not suspecting that it was all an elaborate trap and that the Zulus had no intention of honoring their word. The treaty between Retief and Dingaan was still in the pouch the former was carrying. As the White men entered the inner enclosure, the gate was closed behind them. Dingaan greeted the White men, and bid them sit before him. They then drank the crude sorghum beer offered to them, still unsuspecting and full of trust. In the inner enclosure were nearly two thousand Zulus in full combat gear: shields, spears and wooden clubs. Now they had the White men unarmed and outnumbered. At Dingaan’s command they began dancing, shouting and waving their Stone Age weapons in the air.

The White men watched and listened. The Blacks then slowly started moving back and forth: each time advancing three steps and retreating two: gradually they crept closer and closer. At the point where they nearly touched the seated White men, Dingaan jumped up and shouted out “Kill the White Wizards!”

It was too late. the Boer whites realized the treachery which had been played out upon them: a few jumped up and tried to defend themselves with their small hunting knives, but they were no match for the two thousand heavily armed Zulus. Some of them were strangled to death on the spot by crude ropes made of cut up animal skins: the rest were seized, and along with the bodies of their dead comrades, were dragged outside the royal camp to a hill next to Umgungundlovu, called Hlomo Amabuta, the Hill of Execution. This proved the treachery of the Zulus.

The Zulu king Dingaan, chants over the body of the dead White peace maker, Piet Retief. The Trekker leader’s liver was cut out of his body and presented as a gift to Dingaan.

There the Blacks cruelly executed the remaining Whites, one by one, by clubbing and spearing them to death. Last to be killed was Retief himself, after having been forced to watch his own teenage son be clubbed to death. Once dead, Retief’s heart and liver were cut out of his body and ceremoniously presented to Dingaan as proof that the chief White wizard was dead. The White Christian missionary, Francis Owen, whose mission station was situated on a hill overlooking Hlomo Amabuta, witnessed all these events. Despite the tragedy being played out before his eyes, the Christian Owen made no effort to warn Retief’s party, encamped as they were only a few hours’ ride away. Instead Owen fled to the British trading settlement at Port Natal (Durban) a few days later.

A Zulu attack on a Boer convoy.

So it was that no news reached the Voortrekker camp of women, children and old men along the Blaukraans river for ten days: the last word they had received was that Retief had been successful in negotiating land from the Zulus and that everything was in order. An atmosphere of joviality prevailed in the camp: the Trek had paid off. However, the reality was different: during the night of 16 February 1838, the Zulus struck. The Boers’ camps were small, scattered and poorly defended. Filled with a false sense of security, they were easy targets for the 10,000 strong Zulu army sent to annihilate them. Attacking at 1:00 am in the morning, the Zulus fell upon the largely sleeping White camps. The small camp of the Liebenberg family was quickly overrun and all of its inhabitants murdered as they slept. Next the Zulus made their way to the Bezuidenhout camp: Daniel Peter Bezuidenhout saw his wife, mother and sisters slaughtered by the Zulu spears and although badly wounded himself, he managed to escape and riding his horse, warn some of the neighbouring settlements. Still the Blacks pressed home the attack. entire families were killed, with one man grabbing his baby daughter and running for miles through the bush clutching his child to his chest, only to find that she was already dead, killed so efficiently by a spear that she had not even cried out. Finally some of the larger camps managed to draw their wagons into a defensive circle, or laager, and the Zulus were warded off.

But the cost had been frightful: nearly 300 Whites had been killed, including 41 men, 56 women and 185 children. Added to the 70 men killed with Retief, the Blacks had killed more than half of all the Whites in the entire Great Trek in Natal.

The scenes greeting the survivors as daylight broke on the 16 February were horrendous: where the Zulus had overwhelmed the White camps, entire wagons were drenched with gore. Johanna van der Merwe was found dead with 21 spear wounds; Catherina Prinsloo with 17. Elizabeth Smit lay dead, her breast hacked off, with her three-day-old baby beside her. Anna Elizabeth Steenkamp described in her diary a wagon filled with 50 corpses, most of them children, drowned in their own blood. The site was thereafter called Weenen, or weeping, a name it has retained to this day. For a while the entire Great Trek faltered: the Boers grimly held onto their camps, too weak to move on and too weak to stay. The Zulus then turned their attention towards the British trading settlement of Port Natal, besieging the Whites there in what had become an obvious racial war of anti-White extermination. The British garrison, although heavily outnumbered, held onto what would later become Durban, with equally fierce determination, and the Zulus did not manage to break the defenses, despite great efforts in this regard.

After this massacre, the whole Great Trek teetered on the brink of disaster: many wanted to give up and return to the comparative safety of the British ruled Cape, while others then turned their attentions further north even deeper into the interior, into what became the Transvaal and Orange Free State (Moden day Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Free State). There, the first piece of land occupied by Whites there was obtained by treaty from the Bataung tribe, and the town of Winburg was established in this region. The remaining men in the Boer camps in Natal then came to the conclusion that the trek should be abandoned: the losses they had suffered in Natal had been far worse than anything they had endured during their stay in the Cape Province, the ‘kaffir’ (an old ancient term used for rebellious blacks) Wars included. At this crucial junction, the brave Boer women stepped forward and insisted of the men that the Trek continue: too many sacrifices had been made for them to give up now. By cajoling, mocking and in many instances physically taking the lead, the women won the day: the men gave up their plans to return to the Cape and once again drew new strength to carry on.

However, further setbacks waited: a new commando under Piet Uys tried to avenge the massacre of the White women and children: they were defeated by the Zulus at the Battle of Italeni, which cost the life of Uys and his teenage son. Once again the threat of total defeat loomed along with a loss of White life.

News of the plight of the Trekkers had by now reached the Cape: a wave of support came flooding for the Whites, culminating in the arrival of hundreds of new Trek volunteers. Amongst them was a farmer from Graaff Reinett, Andries Pretorius (Pretoria is named after him), a dynamic natural leader who was elected Commandant General by the till then still leaderless Boers in November 1838. Within a week, Pretorius had organized a Boer commando of 451 men, including three British people – – Scotsmen actually, defenders of Port Natal who wanted to avenge the bloody Zulu attacks on the British settlements.

So it was that a combined White Boer and White English speaking commando, armed with two cannons, set off in search of the Zulus. After six days of running battles with Zulu patrols, Pretorius chose his camp: covered on the one side by the Ncome River and on the other by a deep ditch, or donga, the Boers arranged their 64 wagons in an almost triangular shape, with the longest part of the triangle running across the side of the laager which had no natural defense. Ever the improvisers, the White party then cut down masses of thorn bushes and placed them in the donga and underneath and between the wagons themselves, a highly effective early barbed wire.

They also hung lanterns on the end of their long oxen whips, which then protruded out over the outside perimeter of the wagons, providing illumination to prevent a surprise night time attack by the Zulus. Later the Blacks would tell that they had been petrified of the magic of the White wizards, in particular the “ghosts” which hanged above the wagons during the night. Then the Boers prayed to God that if they were granted victory, they and their descendants would celebrate the day for ever more as a sacred day and celebrate it as if it “were a Sabbath”. This vow gave rise the day being called in later times the “Day of the Vow”, although in fact the actual battle, which was celebrated on 16 December, was not the same day upon which the Vow was taken but rather on the day of the battle.

At dawn on 16 December 1838, the Zulus finally attacked. Each Zulu regiment was led by its commander, the younger men in the vanguard, the older veterans making up the rear. As they moved forward, estimates of their numbers varied from between 10,000 and 30,000. They chanted and stamped their feet in unison; a frightening sight by any account. The 451 Whites had little illusion of what their fate would be if the tens of thousands of Blacks overwhelmed their tiny position. Pretorius ordered his men not to fire until they were absolutely sure of making a kill: exercising iron self control, the Whites waited until the Zulu battle line had advanced to within ten paces of the wagons: then the White guns opened up on the Black masses, and the Zulu attackers were cut down by their hundreds. The few primitive spears thrown by the Zulus hardly even reached the wagons. The Zulus fell back, struck down by the White Wizards’ magic killing sticks to which they had no answer. On the river side of the laager, the Zulus at first tried to attack through the water: bringing one of the cannons to bear, the Whites blasted the Black ranks at virtual point blank range, each shot killing dozens of Zulus. Finally the Whites had fired so many rounds they ran out of cannon shot: once again, they had considered this possibility, and had pre-selected and stored suitably shaped stones, which they now loaded into the cannons, continuing to rain a merciless fire upon the Blacks. These cannon were unquestionably decisive: the Blacks had never seen such weapons before, and it must have seemed as if the White Wizards now had fire spitting dragons on their side as well. Again and again the Zulus tried to attack: each time they were driven off by the combined White artillery and musket fire. At no stage did the Blacks even get close enough to stab any White: only two Whites (one was Pretorius himself) were nicked by spears thrown by the Zulus, but that was all. By now, several thousand Blacks had been killed by the White Wizardry.

Blood River Battle monument, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa.

As the Black line wavered once more; Pretorius gave the order to attack. Leading a detachment of 150 mounted men, one wagon was pulled aside and the commando galloped out to ride straight into the foremost Zulu regiment of over 2,000. Dumb struck with terror at the guns, the cannon and now the White Wizards on their huge hoofed beasts, the Zulu line broke in fright and turned tail and fled. The Blacks tried to outrun the horses: dozens could not and were trampled underfoot. Hundreds tried to dodge the horses and guns by jumping into the Ncome River, which took them above their heads. This was to no avail. The accurate musket fire and the cannons blasted them as they struggled in the river, and the water quite literally turned red with their blood: hence the river became known to this day as Blood River. The Black attack was broken: the Whites pursued the fleeing Blacks until dark, exacting a violent and bloody revenge for the massacre of the White women and children at Blaukraans. Zulu dead at the battlefield itself totalled over 3,000 – but this does not include those killed off site or who died of wounds elsewhere.

An artist’s impression of the battle of blood river.

The highly Calvinistic Trekkers took their victory as a sign from the Christian God that they were meant to win and the belief in a divine mission in Africa was born into Boer consciousness, with the battle later assuming virtual mythical proportions, being celebrated every year thereafter with church services of thanks.

I judge historical choices OUT of context only to guard against repeating mistakes. For the rest, I gladly grapple with hermeneutics. Reading history IN context, when in its time it was ridiculous to find otherwise. That (Apartheid, slavery, Inquisitions) is the way it was and children of their time did what children of their time did. For the same reason we don’t abscond from Christianity simply because Jesus never reprimanded slavery, which, much like Apartheid, was also legal in its day. – Steve Hofmeyr

Steve Hofmeyr is noted South African activist for human rights and a singer, and throughout all these years has been working hard for the preservation of South African heritage both black and white.

The white settlements: Outposts not colonies as harmony was ever present in outposts:

The white settlements in South Africa were rather outposts, not colonies as the Europeans only intended to use the land as a refueling station for their colonial offices in Asia (as Suez canal was not even discovered at that time).

As it is obvious that the first major permanent White settlement in Africa came in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company (a Dutch trading company) sent one of its officials, Jan van Riebeeck, to modern day Cape Town with the intentions of building a resupply station for company ships traveling to Asia and then from Asia back to Europe. As the first White settlement spread around this station, the Afrikaner settlers met the non-Whites, tribes of Xhosa speaking (Khoisan) Hottentots and Bushmen who were happy to trade cattle, produce and other stuff with the new settlers eventually leading to intermarriages and the formation of the mixed race community known as ‘Coloured‘. Though, the region was not a colony but rather an outpost, it became known as Cape Colony.

First farmers of the Dutch community in South Africa

By 1657, it was evident that the company’s farming efforts were inadequate. Hence, a small number of company employees were released from their contracts and were subsequently given uninhabited land to work on as independent farmers which would eventually supply the company’s needs. the first White farmers in Southern Africa – called Free Citizens – were created (Hence the name Orange Free State once given to Modern day Free State). Between 1680 and 1700, the Dutch encouraged White immigration to the South Africa in ever increasing numbers: Dutch, Germans and French Huguenots (Protestants escaping religious persecution by Catholics in France) all started arriving, quickly filling up the region in and around Cape Colony (Cape Town today). However, this immigration caused a wave of exodus of the local Xhosa speaking Bushmen.

Relations with the native Khoisan bushmen became turbulent. At First, their numbers were decimated by the introduction of European diseases to which they had literally no resistance (As their traditional healing methods were of no match to the European medicine), and then slowly they were departed from the area surrounding Cape Town. Since the Hottentots and Bushmen were nomads, there was no claimed land for the White settlers to seize. As the number of White farms increased, the roaming space of the natives grew smaller. The White settlers soon began complaining about stock thefts and petty crimes committed by the Hottentots and Bushmen leading to short and one-sided armed clashes (reminiscent of the wars between Red Indians and American Cowboys) then took place during which the Bushmen (who were never united) moved in large numbers north (Modern day Namibia) where their remnants have remained till modern times. At the same time, the Dutch decided to import slaves to work on farms in South Africa. most of these slaves were Indonesians referred to as Malays (as Indonesia at that time was a part of the Malaysian sultanate who had ruled Malaysia, Indonesia and part of the Philippines). a large number of black slaves from nearby African regions were also called in, with the nearest slave trade station being 1000 kilometers (621 miles apart from the Cape region).

The Dutch East India company, on written order from the Government of the Netherlands in 1652 issued orders for prohibiting inter-racial marriages, on fears of subversion. Simon van der Stel, then Governor of Cape Colony forbid all inter-racial marriages between Cape Colony residents and freed slaves. In 1685, the first law prohibiting interracial marriages in the Cape was formally proclaimed, and a Whites only school had been established for the children of colonists. Eventually the remnants of the Hottentot population, the Malays and Black slaves as well as a number of Whites, mixed together to produce a mixed race group which later was to be called Cape Coloureds. Some of these mixed racial types (Cape Malay & White mixed race) did however “pass over” into the officially classified White group, and modern estimates are that about 6 percent of Afrikaners who claim to be White, are actually of mixed ancestry.

Eventually, the number of white settlers grew & so did the first inklings of a sense of national identity (exactly as had happened in all the other major White settlements in the new lands). Dutch was the common and dominant language in the Cape Colony area, and after some years whites moved into the interior areas of South Africa and spoke an old dialect of Dutch and since they were mostly farmers they began to be called ‘Boers‘ and by this name they are still renown the world over.

Around 1770, some 120 years after the first White settlement was started, the farming community began to push evermore eastward from Cape Town, crossing what is the Southern Cape and finally encountering the first major Black tribe, the Xhosa, in the present day Eastern Cape – some 1,000 kilometres from Cape Town.

The farmers who moved were called “Trek Boers” or “Boer Trekkers” (trek means move) and they pushed further and further into the interior of the country, motivated partly by a desire to obtain new land but also by an increasing dissatisfaction with Dutch colonial rule at Cape Town. After meeting the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape, both the eastward migration of the White Trek Boers and the southwards migrating Blacks came to a halt: on the Fish River border between the two racial groups, a series of nine racial wars took place over a space of nearly 70 years (starting in 1781 and only grinding to a halt in 1857), becoming known as the “Kaffir Wars”. (Although the term “kafir” has of course come to be derogatory, the actual word itself is of Arabic origin, “khufr”, meaning non Non-Christian or Muslim, and thus equally applicable to Whites or any other racial group).

Eventually their Treks eastwards in to areas of Modern day Port Elizabeth led to race wars between the Xhosas and The Boers. these race wars severely tested the resolve of the Boer Trekkers, and later the British settlers in the area with many atrocities being committed by both sides mostly in retaliation for earlier attacks and often sparked off by cattle thefts. The wars came to an eventual end in 1857, after a Xhosa prophetess convinced virtually her entire tribe that a spirit had spoken to her and had instructed all the Xhosa to kill their cattle and destroy all their supplies.

On February 18th, 1857 – the sun would arise blood red in colour and all the dead Xhosa warriors would rise from the dead and sweep all the Whites into the sea – a violently anti-White outpouring which was not unusual for the time in what turned out to be a major disaster for the Xhosa, they followed this prophetess’ advice, destroyed their stores, killed virtually all their livestock and settled down to wait for their dead warriors to arise. Fortunately for the Whites, this was where the plan went wrong: on the appointed day nothing happened, and after several weeks, Xhosa power was broken by a combination of starvation and disillusionment. As a result, the Xhosas were dealt a heavy defeat and the Boers became victorious.

South Africa was once a prosperous republic, now thrashed by the Government of the African national Congress which has made it okay to MURDER, RAPE, STEAL and name ANY SIN you want to, if you are BLACK. Blaming the Whites for the Apartheid before 1994 that marginalized the Blacks, Nelson Mandela’s presidency hoped to quell the tensions and asked the Blacks to work together with the Whites as they had only taken control away from us and nothing else. Alas, his pleas were ignored by his very own people.

Inhabited first by the Blacks in modern day Zimbabwe and South Africa, Black tribe settle ments were found in the northern area of South Africa. However, they could not be wholly and satisfactorily classified as the first settlers as they came in, settled and left for the Forests of Botswana and Zimbabwe. they did come back and settle in areas near modern day Durban and East London, leaving two dominant black groups, the Xhosa and the Zulu.

Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias led the first European voyage in 1487 to land in southern Africa & On 4 December of the same year, he landed at Walfisch Bay (Walvis Bay in Namibia today). This was south of the farthest point reached in 1485 by his predecessor, Diogo Cão. Dias further continued down the western coast of southern Africa. After 8th January 1488, prevented by storms from proceeding along the coast, he sailed out of sight of land and passed the southernmost point of Africa without seeing it. He reached as far up the eastern coast of Africa as, what he called, Rio do Infante, probably the present-day Groot river. in May 1488, but on his return he saw the Cape, which he first named Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms). The King of Portugal at the time John II renamed the point Cabo da Boa Esperança (Cape of Good Hope), as it led to the riches of the East Indies. Dias’ feat of navigation was later immortalised in Luis de Camoes’ Portuguese epic poem, The Lusiads (1572).

Whites led by Jan van Riebeeck arrived at modern day Cape Town in the 17th century AD. before that numerous indigenous black paintings were discovered in caves near the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. The earliest settlers were in fact Whites from The Netherlands, France & Germany who were known as ‘Afrikaners’ & ‘Boers’ (Boer being the Dutch word for farmer). The farmers inhabited lands that are part of modern day Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London. they were a prosperous community engaged in farming, ranching and trading. even despite repeated attacks from the black Xhosa and Zulu tribes, they eventually reached a ceasefire and intermarriages between the blacks and whites formed the ‘Coloureds’ or ‘Mixed race heritiage’. Cape Town outgrew itself as a checkpost and became the nation’s largest city until the Witswatersrand (White Water Rush) gold rush in modern day Johannesburg (aka Jo’Burg) led to the discovery of gold and migration of the Afrikaners to that area.

The arrival of the British in modern day Durban spiced up the situation. They took over the Cape Colony (cape Town area these days) to prevent the French from taking over Southern Africa after the French Republic had invaded the Dutch Republic in Europe. Having standing interests in Australia and India, Britain wanted to use Cape Town as an interim port for its merchants’ long voyages. The British returned Cape Town to the Dutch Batavian Republic in 1803, the Dutch East India Company having effectively gone bankrupt by 1795. After that they further expanded into modern day Johannesburg, prompting the Afrikaner exodus from Cape Area (which was not much but still of concern).

Afrikaner exodus began from 1806 as they were subject to British control. the Afrikaners founded the City of Pretoria named after Voortrekker (Boer Trek Leader) Andres Pretorius. Robert Owen Loftus Versfeld, an Afrikaner of German Descent was the father of modern day sports in South Africa who helped promote rugby, football and cricket. His association was headquartered in the Loftus Versfeld park which is now modern day Loftus Versfeld stadium. After 1806, with the expansion of White British and Afrikaner settlements repeated conflicts occurred between the Whites and the Blacks. the discovery of diamonds and gold in 1867 and 1884 respectively triggered the mineral revolution.

Zulus grew powerful in the first two decades of the 19th century, wiping out other black tribes in the interior plateau of the South African region and wiped out other black tribes, prompting exodus of the Xhosa to the Cape Town area (A Ghost region inhabited by the Whites First !!). The Matabale who were the offshoot of the Zulus established their empire in the higher interior plateau.

After the discovery of Minerals, both the Dutch and British imported slave laborers from modern day Indonesia, India and East Africa as well as Malaysia. the Afrikaner exodus from the Cape Area into interior of South Africa created Three new Boer republics namely: 1). Orange Free State (Modern Day free state, Capital is Bloemfontein), 2). Republic of Natalia (Modern day Kwa-Zulu Natal where Durban is present) & 3). South African Republic ( comprising of Modern day Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Gauteng & Northwest Territories). Both Afrikaners and the British struggled to control the resources and so did the native black population.

Lord Carnarvon successfully introduced of federation in Canada & it was thought that similar political effort, coupled with military campaigns, might succeed with the African kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa. In 1874, Sir Henry Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as High Commissioner for the British Empire to bring such plans into being. Among the obstacles were the presence of the independent states of the South African Republic and the Kingdom of Zululand and its army. In 1879, The Anglo-Zulu War was fought between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom in which the Zulu kingdom overwhelming defeated the British at the Battle of Isandlwana & despite Zulu victory it resulted in the end of the Zulu nation’s independence.